By Jon Rees
Publication Date: 2026-03-24 12:22:00
Mike Lynch’s estate is likely to have been wiped out after a High Court judge ruled ordering him to pay $1.24 billion in damages to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in one of Britain’s biggest fraud cases.
Last year, the judge awarded HPE £700m in damages; However, the American technology giant claimed interest on this figure, which greatly increased the amount owed. This was confirmed today.
The late businessman drowned on his superyacht off the coast of Sicily in August 2024, along with his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and five others in a tragic accident. They were on vacation, celebrating their unexpected acquittal in a criminal fraud trial in the United States.
Lynch had also been sued by HPE in the United Kingdom. In this case, Mr Justice Hildyard ruled in 2022 that Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, his chief financial officer and university friend, had defrauded HPE in the US tech giant’s $11.7bn (£8.7bn) acquisition of his enterprise software company, Autonomy, in 2011.
It wasn’t a…